[Note: photos and hyperlinks found at linked website article.]

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NASA's Mars Perseverance Rover Finds Intriguing Organic Matter in Rock

Just wait till we get the rocks into a lab on Earth.

Amanda Kooser
Sept. 18, 2022 11:41 a.m. PT


Perseverance inspects a sedimentary sample site called Skinner Ridge.
NASA, JPL-Caltech, ASU, MSSS

This story is part of Welcome to Mars, our series exploring the red planet.

In just a year and a half on Mars, NASA's Perseverance rover has absolutely rocked its mission. The agency held a briefing Thursday to discuss highlights from the science mission so far, and it was a celebration of rock samples and the discovery of organic matter.

Organic molecules in Wildcat Ridge

A rock named Wildcat Ridge, located in an ancient river delta region of Jezero Crater, was one of the stars of the show. Percy successfully collected two samples from the mudstone rock. Wildcat Ridge is particularly exciting because the organic molecules (called aromatics) found in it are considered a potential biosignature, which NASA describes as a substance or structure that could be evidence of past life but may also have been produced without the presence of life.

The rover team emphasized that finding organic matter doesn't mean it's found evidence of ancient life. Organic molecules have been spotted on Mars before, by the Curiosity rover in Gale Crater and also by Perseverance, which found carbon-containing molecules earlier in the mission.

The rover's Sherloc instrument investigated the rock. (Sherloc stands for Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics & Chemicals.) "In its analysis of Wildcat Ridge, the Sherloc instrument registered the most abundant organic detections on the mission to date," NASA said.

Scientists are seeing familiar signs in the analysis of Wildcat Ridge. "In the distant past, the sand, mud and salts that now make up the Wildcat Ridge sample were deposited under conditions where life could potentially have thrived," said Perseverance project scientist Ken Farley in a statement. "The fact the organic matter was found in such a sedimentary rock -- known for preserving fossils of ancient life here on Earth -- is important."

Perseverance isn't equipped to find definitive evidence of ancient microbial life on the red planet. "The reality is the burden of proof for establishing life on another planet is very, very high," said Farley during the press conference. For that, we need to examine Mars rocks up close and in person in Earth labs.


Sample drop

Percy currently has 12 rock samples on board, including the Wildcat Ridge pieces and samples from another sedimentary delta rock called Skinner Ridge. It also collected igneous rock samples earlier in the mission that point to the impact of long-ago volcanic action in the crater.

NASA is so happy with the diversity of samples collected that it's looking into dropping some of the filled tubes off on the surface soon in preparation for the future Mars Sample Return (MSR) campaign. MSR is an ambitious plan to send a lander to Mars, pick up Percy's samples, rocket them off the surface and bring them back to Earth for close study. The mission is under development. If all goes as planned, those rocks could be here by 2033.

The complexity and importance of MSR means NASA and its partners are working out ways to ensure the samples can be collected. There's hope Perseverance will still be operating in good condition by the time the MSR lander arrives, and will be able to meet it and personally deliver samples. Leaving some samples on the ground this early in the mission at a cache site in the crater will give MSR another opportunity to get the precious rocks on board.

Percy has been collecting paired samples. For example, it could keep one Wildcat Ridge tube on board and drop the other on the ground. "That we are weeks from deploying Perseverance's fascinating samples and mere years from bringing them to Earth so scientists can study them in exquisite detail is truly phenomenal," said NASA JPL Director Laurie Leshin. "We will learn so much."


What's next for Percy

As thrilling as the delta has been, the rover team is looking ahead at future adventures beyond it. Perseverance could wander up the crater rim, with the team eyeing several possible paths for the climb. Its companion Ingenuity helicopter is in good health and expected to take to the air again.

NASA chose Jezero Crater for exploration because of its fascinating history of water and how the rocks there might preserve evidence of ancient life, if it existed during more habitable times on Mars. Sherloc scientist Sunanda Sharma likened the mission to a treasure hunt for organic life on another planet, saying the samples with aromatics are a clue. The Martian mystery is only just beginning to unfold.

First published on Sept. 15, 2022 at 11:37 a.m. PT.


@ 11 minute recent NASA briefing with mission updates, maps, and detailing the next planned phases of the Perseverance and Ingenuity missions.


https://m.youtube.com/watch?ti...9vc&feature=emb_logo

So part of the mission is to eventually bring back samples from Mars. Why does that make me nervous?
The first thing I thought of was the movie Andromeda Strain.
It's one thing for rocks to go through the vacuum of space then through a fiery reentry through our atmosphere it is another to bring them back on purposes.
And yes I know we brought rocks back from the moon. They were on a planet with no atmosphere so in theory nothing could be alive on them, however look at how we quarantined the astronauts and the rocks when they first came home from Apollo 11.

This all just makes me a little nervous.

Nothing to worry about. There are no microbes on Mars evolved to destroy humans and hibernating until we bring them home. Even if there were microbes that could live on Mars, they would quickly die in our environment.

Organic just means compounds containing carbon. They like to use that word because most people attribute it to life forms. It’s simply not that. The article even mentions this but still tries to intrigue us into supporting more tax dollars for this crap.

quote:

Originally posted by frayedends:
Nothing to worry about. There are no microbes on Mars evolved to destroy humans and hibernating until we bring them home. Even if there were microbes that could live on Mars, they would quickly die in our environment.

Organic just means compounds containing carbon. They like to use that word because most people attribute it to life forms. It’s simply not that. The article even mentions this but still tries to intrigue us into supporting more tax dollars for this crap.

I don't know maybe I have just watched to many movies

In all seriousness with what we just went through these last few years it's not something I feel we should not be doing. We can't handle things on this planet let alone possibly bringing something back from another planet.

I just do not think we should take the chance. When we send men to Mars let them study it there that way if it does turn out to be bad at least it is there and not here.

Thanks for posting. Although I don’t make an effort to follow developments very closely, the possibility of extraterrestrial life fascinates me. If there is one thing that I’d like to learn before I die, it’s that life exists on other planets. That’s almost a certainty, but confirmation is another matter.

(And the reactions to such efforts and findings are almost as fascinating.)

Responsible pet owners clean up after.

Hype = $$$

Be skeptical of every claim they make.

Haven't they decided Mars appears to have once had an atmosphere and the 'canals' once had water in them? I thought they also decided there's lots of water on Mars as well. The Russian probe's images of Phobos are also quite interesting. Remember the news about the monolith like the one in Arthur C Clarke's book '2001: A Space Odyssey' showing up in the images of Phobos?

quote:

Originally posted by parabellum:
Hype = $$$

Be skeptical of every claim they make.

Agreed...gotta sell it.

Isn’t there a theory that extraterrestrial microbes, which didn’t evolve among earth life, would be harmless to it? Or isn’t it just as likely that our microbes would attack any extraterrestrial life with equal fervor?

All I know is you just don't want to be around anything that comes from Uranus.

quote:

Originally posted by sigcrazy7:
Isn’t there a theory that extraterrestrial microbes, which didn’t evolve among earth life, would be harmless to it? Or isn’t it just as likely that our microbes would attack any extraterrestrial life with equal fervor?

I've heard that. Of course, biology books said all life on Earth was carbon based and then a researcher found one based on arsenic. They said no life could exist without sunlight or oxygen, and then we found life deep in the arctic ice that had neither. They said nothing could live at 300F+ near volcanic vents in the ocean, then they found bacteria there. Wasn't there recently some bacteria discovered that breaks down radioactive waste?

Carbon; made in a sun/star.

A very common element

Add 4 hydrogens to one carbon and you get methane - simple organic chemistry. No “life” required.

2 carbons is butane, 3 is propane and 8 is … you guessed it … octane.

^Absolutely correct, but the article mentions they were "aromatics". Just think that molecules based on benzene rings are further along the organic evolutionary tree than more basic straight-chain carbon molecules or the like. No, it's not life, but perhaps one more step towards the possibility of carbon-based life.

Not an expert but I tend to think of aromatics as fragile and volatile. Seems like they wouldn’t last long in a vacuum like space. But how are they created? Seems unsurprising to find it in nature, just in a vacuum. Are they difficult to make?

^Very good observation. If extra-terrestrial life formed on Mars the way it's believed happened on earth, then at one point Mars had an atmosphere. It almost certainly did, based on evidence of surface water etched into its surface.

Combine an early reducing atmosphere with energy input from the sun and/or lightning, and you have a simmering pot of primordial soup, i.e. the production of organic building blocks.

Early life-forms eventually released enough oxygen into the atmosphere to change it from reducing to oxidizing, paving the way for more complex organisms to evolve using energy from oxidative reactions, i.e. metabolism.

I wonder if any of these scientists who are looking for evidence of life outside of Earth do not accept as inevitable truth that life absolutely can and does exist all over the universe.

quote:

Originally posted by parabellum:
I wonder if any of these scientists who are looking for evidence of life outside of Earth do not accept as inevitable truth that life absolutely can and does exist all over the universe.

They don’t wanna lose their funding…

But of course life is spread throughout the entire universe.

Isn’t this how the Andromeda Strain begins?